Five months ago, I was standing in Arena Joondalup watching Chappell Roan turn Laneway Perth into one enormous, glitter-covered queer singalong.
At the end of our review, after a day of Wolf Alice, Wet Leg, PinkPantheress, Lucy Dacus, Role Model and a small army of pink cowboy hats, I wrote: “You’re our favourite.”
Then: “Let’s do it again.”
Well. About that.
Laneway Festival announced on Monday, 10 August, that Perth and Adelaide will be missing from its 2027 circuit, with next year’s festival continuing through Auckland, Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. Brisbane returns after the Queensland leg moved to the Gold Coast for 2026.
For Perth, this breaks a very long streak. Laneway first came west in 2009 and, outside the COVID shutdown years of 2021 and 2022, has returned every year since. Adelaide has been part of the festival since 2008 under the same circumstances.
So yes, this one stings.
Laneway says Perth will be back
In its official Instagram announcement, Laneway told Perth and Adelaide fans it would be “taking a break” in both cities for 2027. Organisers pointed to the sheer logistical effort involved in moving a huge touring festival, its artists and crew across Australia and New Zealand in such a short window.
The pause, according to Laneway, gives the team room to concentrate resources on fewer festival stops and leaves more space for artists to schedule their own headline shows in cities outside the circuit. Organisers have framed it as temporary and thanked Perth and Adelaide audiences for supporting the festival over the years.
I desperately hope the temporary part holds.
The headline-show reasoning is a harder pill to swallow from this side of the country. Perth fans already know the peculiar little ritual of opening an Australian tour announcement, scanning Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, perhaps spotting Adelaide, and then reaching the bottom of the poster with the growing suspicion that Western Australia has once again drifted out to sea.
Fans made exactly that point underneath Laneway’s announcement, including one commenter who noted that solo tours already regularly skip Perth and Adelaide.
So the promise that losing Laneway could create room for more touring artists to visit us comes with a fairly substantial citation needed floating above it.
Please prove us wrong. Genuinely.
Perth was not feeling diplomatic
The reaction underneath the announcement has been about as calm and measured as you’d expect.
One person went with:
“WE ARE ALREADY SUFFERING PLEASE DON’T MAKE US SUFFER ANYMORE.”
Another offered an impressively concise:
“Sending hate from Perth.”
And perhaps the comment that gets closest to why this announcement feels bigger than one missing date:
“This is really disappointing — performing arts in Australia is in crisis.”
There it is.
Because this news has arrived during a rotten period for Australian live music.
Splendour in the Grass disappeared from the calendar. Groovin the Moo cancelled its 2024 and 2025 festivals before making a limited return in NSW in 2026. Festival organisers across the country have spent years talking about rising production costs, insurance, weaker advance ticket sales and the increasingly frightening mathematics involved in getting a large event off the ground.
A federal parliamentary inquiry into Australian live music, published in 2025, found that around 35 per cent of festivals surveyed had lost money, while younger audiences were buying fewer tickets than before the pandemic. The inquiry also heard repeatedly about rising costs and the importance of festivals as stages where Australian artists can actually find new audiences.
Meanwhile, Creative Australia reported in June that cost is now the biggest barrier to arts attendance for 60 per cent of Australians surveyed, with more than half saying they had missed events they wanted to attend because they couldn’t afford them.
The spreadsheets are getting scary.
And Perth sits several thousand kilometres away from the cities where most of the Australian music industry is concentrated.
Every time something gets shaved off a national circuit, we feel it.
We’ve spent the last two years at Laneway Perth
This probably hurts more because Laneway has become part of Unruly Folk’s own little calendar.
We covered Laneway Perth 2025 at Wellington Square, a profoundly sweaty day involving Charli xcx, Olivia Dean, Remi Wolf, Djo, Clairo, Beabadoobee, Barry Can’t Swim and enough sunscreen to grease a small aircraft.
Then came Laneway Perth 2026 at Arena Joondalup, headlined by Chappell Roan. That one stayed with me.
The crowd felt unusually warm, queer and femme. The accessibility work mattered. The low-sensory space mattered. Watching thousands of people do HOT TO GO! together while Chappell presided over the whole ridiculous spectacle felt incredibly special. I came home physically destroyed and still wrote that Laneway was our favourite.
Those days mean a hell of a lot to us.
They mean work for photographers, production crews, security staff, vendors, hospitality workers, promoters and countless people whose names never appear on the poster. They put local artists in front of audiences who might never have found them otherwise. They give young music fans a chance to see ten artists in a day when ten separate headline tickets would be financially impossible.
And sometimes you get Chappell Roan dressed as she has emerged from a lesbian gothic fever dream, so there is also that.
Losing one year of Laneway does not erase Perth’s live music scene. Perth musicians, venues, promoters and audiences will continue doing what they have always done.
It still leaves a bloody big hole.
And yes, Adelaide got shafted too
Adelaide fans have every right to be filthy as well.
The city has been part of Laneway’s regular Australian run since 2008 outside the pandemic interruption, and 2027 will leave both South Australia and Western Australia without a festival date.
There is something particularly grim about looking at an Australian festival map where the entire western half of the continent has effectively been erased.
I’m writing this from Perth, though. I live here. I cover gigs here. I know the little spike of excitement when an international tour poster actually has PERTH printed on it.
I also know how tired everyone is of being told geography makes us difficult.
Geography does make things difficult. Moving stages, gear, crew and artists across this enormous bastard of a country costs serious money. Laneway’s logistical explanation is perfectly believable, especially given what festival operators have been saying about costs for years.
Understanding the reason does very little for the space it leaves behind.
Perth shows up
That is the bit I keep coming back to.
We show up.
We showed up for Charli. We showed up for Chappell. We showed up in the February heat, bought the overpriced drinks, queued for food, squeezed ourselves into packed crowds, caught trains home smelling like sunscreen and somebody else’s vape, and did the whole ridiculous festival ritual because live music is worth being a bit feral for.
Laneway knows that. Its own farewell-for-now message thanked the people of Perth and Adelaide who have supported it for years.
So I’m choosing to cling to the for now.
I want 2028 to arrive with Perth firmly back on the poster. I want this to become one shitty blank year in a much longer history.
But 2027 will still be missing something.
For a city already used to watching tours sail past the Nullarbor, losing one of the festivals that reliably made the crossing feels genuinely awful.
We’ll be here when you come back, Laneway.
Please come back.
TL;DR
- Laneway Festival will skip Perth and Adelaide in 2027, with Auckland, Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne remaining on the circuit.
- Perth has been a Laneway stop every non-COVID year since 2009. Adelaide’s run dates back to 2008.
- Organisers say the break is about the logistical demands of the touring festival and is intended to be temporary.
- Fans are understandably furious, particularly given how regularly national and international tours already miss WA and SA.
- The announcement lands during an already brutal period for Australian festivals and live music, with rising costs and changing ticket-buying behaviour putting serious pressure on the industry.
- Unruly Folk has covered Laneway Perth for the past two years. We would very much like our sweaty February nonsense back.
Stay unruly.
